Wyndham Hotels
Wyndham Hotels and Resorts is a group of chains of hotels and resorts located mainly in the United States and Canada, but also in Mexico and the Caribbean. History Wyndham Hotel Corporation was founded in 1981 in Dallas, Texas, by Trammell Crow, president of Trammel Crow Company (TCC). The company appears to have been named after a friend of Crow's, a woman named Wyndham Robertson, who wrote a profile of him for Fortune magazine. As the company grew, it eventually merged with a hotel REIT called Patriot American Hospitality (PAH). Patriot American organized the combined company as a paired-share REIT, in which Patriot owned the real estate assets and leased the hotels to Wyndham to run. The firm grew rapidly in the late 1990s, acquiring multiple portfolios of hotels and renaming them Wyndhams. In 1998, in an effort to build an upscale limited-service brand, the company acquired the Summerfield Hotel Corporation and renamed it Summerfield Suites by Wyndham. Wyndham Garden Hotels are smaller properties, usually full-service, that are located in suburban or airport locations. Later that year, the combined company introduced a short-lived luxury brand, Grand Bay Hotels & Resorts, which would include 11 hotels that the company had acquired over the past few years and would turn Patriot into a multi-brand hotel operating and ownership organization. The company also included several European properties, including The Great Eastern Hotel in the City of London. However, the company's rapid growth drained cash and the firm was unable to continue to grow on its own. In March, 1999, the group agreed to a $1 billion restructuring when a consortium of private equity firms, including Thomas H. Lee Partners and Apollo Real Estate Advisors, assumed control of the company. They renamed it Wyndham International. The company's paired share status was dropped, and Wyndham International re-emerged as a C corporation. From 1999 to 2004, the firm struggled to pay down debt and was forced to sell off many of the hotels it had acquired in the late 1990s, often at a deep discount in an industry still suffering from the effects of the 9/11 terrorist attacks. The effort to expand the Grand Bay Hotels & Resorts brand was canceled, and the brand's franchised limited-service offerings, Summerfield Suites and Wyndham Garden Hotels, continued to lose units as hotels converted out of the system. Many of the Summerfield Suites hotels were sold to the Intercontinental Hotels Group and were converted to Staybridge Suites hotels. In June, 2005, Wyndham International was acquired by affiliates of the Blackstone Group, for $3.24 billion and taken private. In the subsequent months, many of its hotels were sold to Goldman Sachs Group and Columbia Sussex. Blackstone rebranded most of the remaining assets as LXR Luxury Resorts and sold the Wyndham and Wyndham Garden Hotel brands to Cendant. Blackstone sold Summerfield Suites to Global Hyatt, which expects to rename it Hyatt Summerfield Suites. On August 1, 2006, all Cendant hotel brands became part of Wyndham Worldwide. Wyndham Worldwide consists of the following brands of hotels: Baymont Inn & Suites, Days Inn, Howard Johnson's, Knights Inn, Ramada, Super 8, Travelodge, Wyndham, Wyndham Garden Hotels, Hawthorn Suites, and Wingate by Wyndham. Besides hotels, the company also operates Wyndham Vacation Resorts (formerly Fairfield Resorts) and WorldMark by Wyndham (formerly Trendwest) time share resorts. External links * Wyndham hotel site * Wyndham Vacation Resorts site * Photos of a Wyndham Resort in Bayahibe, Dominican Republic Category:Hotel chains Category:Wyndham Worldwide Category:Wyndham brands Category:Companies based in Morris County, New Jersey